Blog

2018

In December, we released an analysis and interactive map to help Chicago communities better understand gentrification pressures and the risk of displacement in their neighborhood. The tool identifies areas where home prices have appreciated faster than...

2017

The recently launched web-based mapping tool for Regional Housing Solutions allows local government and policymakers to see how a range of housing issues play out across the region, beyond municipal boundaries, and sets the stage for...

The two-flat has been a stepping stone to the middle class and a source of affordable housing for more than a century. But for how much longer? It’s been called a “workingman’s palace.” The humble two-flat is...

HUD’s prospects under Ben Carson and ways to build more affordable housing despite it all Finding an affordable apartment is nearly impossible for those living on the margins, thanks in part to the shortfall of about 7.4...

Every day 10,000 Americans celebrate their 65th birthdays. That has been the case since 2011 and will be the case until 2030, according to Pew Research Center. At that point, nearly one in five Americans will be 65 or...

Federal regulators are investigating firms that offer contracts for deed.In Detroit in 2015, there were more contracts for deed than there were mortgages.Under these agreements, homebuyers make a down payment and monthly payments to the seller, who...

2016

More than a year after the Bloomingdale Trail, also known as The 606, opened on the northwest side of Chicago, its impact on the surrounding communities is becoming apparent. Our new report analyzes how house prices...

The Bloomingdale
Trail, or The 606, opened just over
a year ago, replacing an old railroad track on the northwest side of Chicago with
an elevated garden/walking, jogging, rollerblading/community gathering spot.
While some neighbors worried about rising home values pushing...

How a unique partnership between
organizers and data analysts helped a community group on Chicago’s southwest
side develop strategies to stabilize the neighborhood’s housing market.In August, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan took a
walking tour of the Chicago Lawn...

For
4 million
households,
the housing crisis still has a stranglehold on their lives. As prices started
to plummet in 2007, many saw their home’s value sink below what they’d paid for
it. Negative equity, or an “underwater” home, is what...

The connection between neighborhood and health
Where you live may
have a bigger impact on how long you live than your genetics, says the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. They mapped life expectancy along major highway exits and transit...

More Americans of all ages and incomes are renting today than at any time since the 1960s. The more than 845,000 renters in Chicago and suburban Cook County face a white-hot rental market that makes developers...

A conversation with Robert Chaskin and Mark JosephIn their recent book, “Integrating
the Inner City: The Promise and Perils of Mixed-Income Public Housing
Transformation,” Robert Chaskin and Mark Joseph detail the demolition of
Chicago’s high-rise public housing and the...

More and more
Americans are opting out of homeownership.Renting
is on the rise.
As
American homeownership rates have fallen in recent years, rental demand has
leapt.
Between
the second quarters of 2014 and 2015, for example, the number of owner-occupied
households dropped by...

2015

Projects like the 606 Trail in Chicago need safeguards that
ensure diverse communities. New amenities in an older neighborhood can be a blessing and
a curse. Just ask the
West Chelsea residents who live near the New York City’s...

The housing crash may
have been national, but the recovery is still local. Our updated
Housing Price Index, released today, underscores how national data can mask
the hyperlocal story of continued struggle—especially in the area of building economically
healthy neighborhoods--and...

As Chicagoans brace
for a property tax increase to fill the city’s budget hole and the rising
pressure of unfunded pensions, we sat down with the our executive director,
Geoff Smith, to get his insights on which neighborhoods will...

After two years of construction, Chicago’s new 606 Trail opened to a flood of joggers, bikers, dogs, and strollers in early
June.
Once an abandoned railroad line littered with
debris and even an old piano, the trail stretches...

The aftermath of the housing crisis has seen major institutional investors scooping up thousands of foreclosed or distressed homes in the Chicago region and throughout the country. Since 2012, HUD, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac have sold...

Property has been one of the surest ways to create wealth
for centuries, as the economist Thomas Piketty makes clear in his book “Capital
in the 21st Century.” More so than hard work, land ownership has
allowed people to...

In 1625, a Dutch carpenter named Pieter
Fransz built a house in
Amsterdam’s new Herengracht neighborhood. “As
the Dutch Republic rose to global power in the 1620s,” wrote Prakash Loungani for the International
...

CHICAGO — As house prices rebound in all communities across
Cook County, the divide between areas that are thriving and those that are
struggling persists, according to the May 13 release of the Cook County House
Price Index from...

Homes in Chicago’s lakeside Lincoln Park neighborhood cost
about what they did at the peak of the housing bubble that burst in 2006. But
Lincoln Park, renowned for its luxury homes, is the exception in Chicago.
According to our...

As
the United States limps out of economic disarray, it can often seem like the nation
is taking one step forward and two back. This spring’s home-buying season is
typical of that lurching sensation.
Home
prices are slowly climbing—by 4.6...

2014

After aggressively entering the housing market in 2012, institutional investors slowed their purchasing of single family homes in early 2014, signaling the beginning of a new phase in the real estate owned (REO)-to-rental cycle that shifts focus away from...

The growth of institutional investors as a dominant player in certain hard-hit housing markets may have implications for the recovery and stability of these markets in coming years. This post examines the recent activity of the...

Where is the housing market headed? The U.S. housing market could be in a recovery that is showing signs of slowing. Or perhaps it is recovering too quickly and another bubble is forming which is on...

John Groene seems to have a story about every property in Humboldt Park—a wealth of knowledge about the owners and transaction histories of so many homes that it has been described as “encyclopedic.”Members of the IHS...

2013

One of the goals of the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University is to work with the staff, faculty, and students at DePaul in order to foster cross-disciplinary learning about community development as it pertains...

Quality data and analysis are fundamental to the successful development and implementation of policy solutions to help solve the region’s vacant-buildings problem, but, in many cases, data gaps exist that make it difficult to answer key...

Few factors are as indicative of the strength or weakness of a neighborhood housing market as the level of long-term residential vacancy. And yet, reliable and easy-to-interpret data on residential vacancy are hard to collect and...

It is generally assumed that the vast majority of residential property purchases are financed with a mortgage. While this is still often the case, one of the many ways in which the U.S. housing market has...

The Cook County Assessor’s Office, responsible for setting values for each of Cook County’s 1.8 million parcels, divides the county’s buildings into 107 different categories – most of them familiar: residential buildings broken out by number...

Mortgage activity from the third quarter of 2012 to the first quarter of 2013 in Oak Park, Illinois (left) and in the Austin Community Area of Chicago (right). Sometimes an image makes you stop in your tracks. In the midst of working with some parcel-level data for a report, our Research and Data Analyst saw one of the starker examples of the difference a simple municipal border can make. On the left side of the image above is the Village of Oak Park, a suburb of the City of Chicago that abuts its western border, on the right is the Chicago Community Area of Austin. The blue-colored parcels on both sides represent residential mortgages originated between the third quarter of...

This is the second post in a series that illustrates how to use the IHS Housing Market Indicators Data Portal to explore trends and patterns in local housing markets within Cook County. The first post in...

This is the first post in a series that illustrates how to use housing market indicators data from the IHS Data Portal to explore trends and patterns in local housing markets within Cook County. The IHS...

Among the key findings from IHS’s recently released State of Rental Housing in Cook County
report was that while the supply of rental units in Cook County increased
between 2007 and 2011 to meet observed
increases in rental demand,...

On April 18, IHS brought together a diverse group of more than 40 housing stakeholders to DePaul’s Loop Campus to preview and discuss the findings of our 2013 State of Rental Housing in Cook County report....

This is the third in a series of posts discussing residential vacancy in Chicago and suburban Cook County. In the first post in this series, we examined patterns of and discussed the negative outcomes associated with...

This is the second in
a series of posts discussing long-term residential vacancy in Chicago and
suburban Cook County. For the first post in this series, click here. The first post in this series, Understanding vacancy: Patterns of long-term
vacancy...

This is the first in a series of posts exploring patterns of
residential vacancy in the City of Chicago and in suburban Cook County. This post includes a discussion of local patterns of long-term residential
vacancy, some of...

Our mission at
IHS is to provide reliable, impartial, and timely data and research that
informs housing policy decisions as well as discussions about the state of
housing in the Chicago region and nationally. The IHS blog is another...